HOW I VIEW MY ROLE:

As a Drama Therapist, I strive to support you in kinship with your and the collective’s imagination. To the roles and soul invisiblized and erased. This is integral to healing from and through traumas, as it is our human nature to find resilience through play, at least I sure have! Some of my most healing moments are times I have permitted a wildly different perspective to take shape. The times I have queered the script, taken a risk, dropped a “norm”, or let something I would maybe think was impossible, play out in my imagination.

Play does not mean toxic positivity and always finding the light. It means expansion, flexibility, new perspectives, and permission. I explore wellbeing with clients from an anti-oppressive stance, grounded in lived experience as true knowing. Life is ABSURD and full of magical strangeness and characters. I like to help us have a good hearted laugh about our wildness, uniqueness, our animalness, our human nature. Laughter is medicine. In sessions we will support your nervous system, intuition, creative spirit, and the health of your relationships. My work is also largely informed by my own healing journey including influences of theater arts, anti-racism, somatics, family systems, ancestral healing work and disability justice. Some of my roles that inform the space I offer: liberation seeker, non-binary and queer human , neuroqueer, white-bodied settler, Ashkenazi Jew, trauma survivor, post traumatic grow-er, community builder, ritualist, theater artist/performer, healer, partner, humor enthusiast, cat parent, writer, and forever student of somatics, nature, and the mystic.

And you know what? Im not healed. I am healing. And I hope, healing forever. I am another human endlessly curious about how we fall apart, and come together, and fall apart, and come together.

I recognize I am moving along an iterative path filled with many mistakes, un-learnings, and transformations as I strive to decolonize practicing healing in Western and capitalist society. That being said, I am not an expert on you, and I don’t believe there is one “right way” towards healing. I work alongside you as a guide to develop an authentic connection built on mutuality & reciprocity, transparent in the systems we live within. It is my hope that in a collaboration with you, we construct a caring space that may offer a deepened awareness of intuition, somatic (embodied) experience, sense of agency, wholeness, love for your many selves (and a good laugh now and again) on your evolving path.

My Approach: Drama Therapy & Coaching

What roles are you playing?

“student, co-parent, lover, disability advocate”

In this life, we may be fortunate to choose some of our life roles. Choosing to be a student, partner, pet owner, or traveler for example. At other times roles are conditioned by culture, given within our family system (outcast, scapegoat, perfect child) that we learn to cope with. Our chosen and unchosen roles are imbedded in a broad web of social systems and institutions, and are the host to both privileges and oppressions. Roles are the conduit through which we can experience place (diasporic one, explorer, community member, newcomer) and spirituality (person of faith, beloved ancestor, nature devotee). All the roles in our repertoire are ever evolving and move along a continumm of connectedness, impacted by traumas. life events, and transitions that can be both generative as well as harmful to our intuition, creativity, and vitality.

“oppressed worker, grieving child, forgotten ancestor, ashamed queer, lonely perfectionist”

The culture we are imbedded in demands we conform both in explicit and insidious hard-to-to-express ways. We find ourselves asking why we continue to feel a chronic sense of self-abandonment, rejection, failure, disconnection, and exhaustion. Why does this suffering at times feel so disproportionate to joy and aliveness? In my view, these are symptoms of sick systems, late stage capitalism, and a patriarchal colonial paradigm, not of you. And yet, here they are living in your soma (body). We can think of these as internalized roles. This is an incredible place of recognition. From this place may we de-shame ourselves from the conditioned tendencies towards hyper-individualism and land within a balance of compassion and accountability to unwind these toxic ways of being.

So how do we harness and sustain the vitality to go from just surviving our destructive conditioning to living in our authenticity?

Well, if there is a role to play, there is story that has been written, a backdrop, a cast of characters, a somatic (embodied experience) of that role emanating through our nervous system, our psychobiology. The conjunction of our mental narrative within a broader cultural and historical narrative is embodied and dramatized. What if you could begin to rewrite the story anew, redirect the roles, resist the assigned conditions, and reform from the inside out?

Through our individual drama therapy & somatic coaching sessions, we will unpack these engrained narratives. They way these stories about ourselves live in our mind and how they become expressed as patterns in our bodies. I support clients to understand where these storylines often originate through ruptures of our early development and then deepen within the oppressive systems that exacerbate (and profit off of!) those wounds. Through trauma informed practice we will blend inner child healing, liberation psychology, somatic explorations, and creative arts experiential approaches to find our soul animate through the layers of condition and traumas. This is a process of remembering our true nature, not a process of finding something that you do not yet have.

The therapeutic journey is curvilinear, painful, exhilarating, joyful, intimate, and bold. You can create new ways of being that shed the habits keeping you down. You can deconstruct and build tools to notice and alchemize the blame and shame that causes pain.

Each person has a repertoire of roles. These roles we play are emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental. This is where Drama Therapy answers the call. We live in action, therefore we heal in active creativity and exchange of energy. In our work together we will focus on getting free from self-imposed and system imposed restraints. Role-suffering comes from interacting within white supremacy, capitalism, diet culture, abelism, purity culture, agism, structural oppression, cis-heteronormativity, the gender binary, and the list goes on. Drama Therapy (relational and action oriented process) encourages justice through the focus on connectedness, play, healing attachment, and collaboration.

What does a Drama Therapy & Coaching Session look like?

In sessions, we may spend time simply talking and making space for pain & vision to surface. I often utilize role theory, discussing aspects of you that may feel ambiguous, in conflict, or unsettled. We will identify harmful patterning. We will challenge the savvy inner critic by honoring its origin story with a focus on early development, social conditioning, and attachment theory. We will seek to identify the gifts and challenges of your upbringing, offering permission to the inner child to be heard and guided in the here-and-now. We will do this through a blend of creative intervention, play, somatic tools, mindfulness, and building our own relationship. Along our journey we may utilize movement of the body (animation of the physical self), creative writing, projective techniques, therapeutic improvisation, story telling, metaphor and more.